Good B2B email marketing examples are few and far in between. That’s a real pity because 90% of B2B marketers use email marketing, 30% of them cite email marketing as their biggest revenue earner, and adding new subscribers to their email marketing as their highest priority. No wonder another study showed that it’s a 40 to 1 return, and every dollar spent on email marketing generates $40.

The B2B email marketing examples that I found suggest we need to do 5 things.

  1. Sell the value of reading the email in the subject.
  2. Use the buyer’s journey to shape your content.
  3. Keep it short unless it needs to be long.
  4. Personalize like a socialite
  5. If you’ve got a picture that tells a thousand words, use it, then cut 1000 words out.
  6. Sell your call to action really well.

I’ve got a ton of B2B email marketing examples and some really tight conclusions to share with you at the end. So stick around, it’s pretty short. I think you’ll like it.

The four articles:

Article 1:

Our first article is by Steven McDonald – 9 B2B email marketing examples. What he talks about is the use cases. 9 types of emails. They’re not just examples, they’re 9 use cases for email. Then an example of each, curated email content and others. Read through the article, there is a Good list of reasons why you’d want to use emails. I want to make a quick comment though about curated email content. What today’s show is, is that in a sense, although this is a video show , it’s still curated, in the sense that I do draw on others’ work, selectively, which I make comments on.. If you’re going to curate anything, do it well. Don’t just present it, be very selective about it, comment on it, contextualize it, and connect one to the other; I would say that you should add some real value to it. He has some other use cases, they’re all valid, activation announcements etc.

Article 2:

The next example is from Lindsay Kolowich. Even though we’re looking for B2B email marketing examples, and these are consumer examples, this is great. Don’t just read the emails that are, duly presented though, read the commentary from Lindsay Kolowich. It’s good commentary, she talks about what she likes and why she likes it, I recommend you read the whole thing end to end. They’re great email marketing examples, a couple of them are B2B, all of them are good and worth reading.

Article 3:

Let’s take a look at our third one. These examples are specifically about lead generation. That’s okay, but as we’ve seen, lead gen is only one type of B2B email marketing. The images were so low in resolution though, that I couldn’t read them, can what a letdown. Good idea, but poorly executed. You shouldn’t bother, really.

Article 4:

The fourth example was the most shared of the lot.  It is by the same author as the first one, Steven McDonald, however on a different site, so he’s obviously doing a bit of guest blogging, good on him. In this case he’s given us 17 B2B email marketing examples. Again, they include not just the use case but an example. Some of them are the same as the examples he used before but there’s more. Really worth checking out, I would say.

It’s an excellent reminder of why an email is worth your attention. I mentioned this at the beginning, and I’m going to say it again: email marketing is key. With so many B2B email marketing examples in this particular article, I found it easy to get into monkey see and monkey do, that is, if you’re doing an announcement, do it like this. I’ll give you some context shortly to help you extract yourself from that pattern. Perhaps you’re smarter than me and you wouldn’t fall into that pattern, I certainly would have. I’ll give you some reusable clarity abstracted from those examples so you can use it as a set of general rules about B2B emails.

What they said:

As I usually do, I’ll give you my spin on that shortly, but let me first say what I think those B2B email marketing examples have told us. Once again, everybody has a different approach to email marketing, but Steven McDonald’s work gives us a good list of use cases of emails. Other article contributors, look at the strategy behind each email. That suggests that we need to keep them short and to the point, clean cut, catchy subject titles, and exploring every opportunity possible.

What I think:

As I said at the top of the show, we need more B2B marketing email examples. 90% of marketers use email in B2B and 30% of B2B marketers cite email marketing as their highest revenue earner. 30% of marketers in B2B also cite adding new subscribers to their email marketing as their highest priority and studies have shown there’s a 40 to 1 return. Every dollar you spend, you get $40 back. We need more B2B email marketing examples, from which we can all learn.

Sell the value of reading the email in the subject – 12 of the best email marketing examples you’ve ever seen and why they’re great is a pretty good start. That’s a great example of a killer email title. Use the buyer’s journey to shape your content, where are they in their journey before they get the email? Where do you think you can get them to in one unexpected email? What do you need to show them or ask them to get them from A to B? That’s what I mean by the buyer’s journey. Third suggestion, keep it short unless it needs to be long. In the email itself, use no more words than you absolutely need, but don’t use any fewer either. Don’t get sucked into some silly dogma about copy length, Be as brief as you can, and no briefer. Personalize like a socialite, if you know lots about your customer, use it. Name is a minimum, ‘Dear Joe’. How about business? Geography? Industry? How long they’ve been a customer? How long they’ve been a subscriber? Use everything you can to personalize.

If you’ve got a picture that tells 1000 words, use it. I’m not going to give any more words than that. Sell your call to action clearly, make it logical in the copy and the image flow too, don’t just sneak up on them with a call to action, logically build using your images, your layout, the words, logically build to your call to action. Don’t finish it and then make a call to action, think about the call to action and maybe even write that first, then write an article that logically leads to that call to action. If you’ve got a longer email, make a call to action multiple times don’t expect every reader to read the whole thing.

Recommendations:

If you’ve been watching the show lately, I have been using it a little bit to lead to a logical conclusion that says, “Hey, go and get a funnel plan.” I think this one does and sort of doesn’t. I want to actually talk about something else in relation to funnel plan instead. We’re actually using fewer emails with funnel plan than we intended originally, we don’t want to bombard users of funnel plan with too many emails, so what we’re actually doing is putting a lot of the great content inside the application. Once a week, we send an email about some great insights that were found, or from the data within funnel plan. All the unique, proprietary insights that are specific to the owner of that plan, we’ll put inside the application so we don’t have to send you really long emails, but you can get all the good oil if you want it.

Funnily enough, in a show about B2B email marketing examples, I’m finding that I’m trying to use emails less and less often. Not that they don’t work, but you really can over communicate to an audience. There’s a bit of a twist. Second thing about funnel plan is in the funnel plan, really look at every tactic in your funnel plan. Here’s your tactic, an email. It could be another tactic, an e-book. A personal meeting. A video. Anything, whatever the tactic is. Look at the before and after. Where are they before they get this piece of tactic? I used this example about the emails. Where are they up to and where do I need to get them to after they’ve consumed this piece of content email in today’s example? Use your funnel plan to be really precise about briefing each of your tactics.

If you haven’t got a funnel plan, start with a free one, go to funnelplan.com. Get a sense of what it’s like to build a plan, we call it the child plan but it’s more than that, you can actually build your plan using the child plan. There’s enough value in the free one that I’m going to recommend.

funnel-plan-sales-and-marketing-planning-tool

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